Professor Dan Cable: Leadership Has Become Synonymous With Ego Trips And Power Trips

Daniel Cable, professor of organizational behavior at London Business School

Daniel Cable, professor of organizational behavior at London Business School

London Business School

Employee engagement – or rather the lack of it – is one of the biggest challenges facing leaders today. According to a 2017 survey by Gallup, for example, two-thirds of American employees are disengaged at work, with the most dissatisfied individuals actively resenting their jobs, griping at co-workers and dragging down office morale. It is precisely this issue that Daniel Cable, professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, seeks to address in his book Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do. In the book, he explains that our brains have “seeking systems” that provide the intrinsic impulse for us to explore our environments, learn and find meaning. Unfortunately, however, many organizations are effectively deactivating their employees’ seeking systems by confining them to routine activities that curb their self-expression and their ability to experiment. Here, Cable talks about why people have lost their zest for work, the trend for happiness directors and the root causes of the global leadership crisis.

Sally Percy: We spend a huge percentage of our lives in the workplace and yet work is an incredibly painful experience for lots of people. Why is that?

Daniel Cable: That’s the biggest meta question for me. So I was thrilled to discover over two years ago that we’ve got this part of our brain that urges us, from childhood and babyhood, to be interested in things that we don’t understand. When I started learning that there was a brain center that was devoted to this, it totally changed how I saw management – in the sense of management as a tool to control people. On the one hand, we’ve got this force inside of us, urging us to stay creative and to try new things, to be curious, to experiment, to grow and to use our potential and our strengths to have impact on others. Yet most of us are in jobs where eight to 10 hours a day are pre-planned, where we do the same thing 10,20 or 30 times a month, where there are very tight metrics and where there’s very little time for experimenting and playing. All of a sudden it dawned on me that this was probably the problem: we are shocked into helplessness.

Percy: Do you think that part of the problem is also that people are threatened by the thought of other people using their own seeking systems?

Cable: Let me give you a big answer and a small answer. The big answer might be that for all of time we’ve been a little threatened when other people are doing things we weren’t predicting. Going back 20,000 years, somebody who was experimenting could have ended up hurting the group. We’ve got norms and those norms are tried and true. They help us to get food, fight enemies and protect our children. The one that I’ve focused on more in my book is that when we invented management, it was about control, predictability, metrics and catching people who weren’t performing adequately. It was about efficiency and getting maximum productivity out of each human. The idea was that if a supervisor or a leader had an idea about doing something, it had to get done. The whole point of a job was: “I tell you what to do and you do it.” So the smaller answer is that we have created organizations assuming that the world doesn’t change that much and leaders get to tell people what to do. Now the world’s changing a lot quicker and that isn’t really working, but that doesn’t mean that it feels normal yet to give up control.

Percy: In your book Alive at Work, you have some interesting ideas for getting the best out of people – for example, serious play and asking people to create fun job titles for themselves. Yet many organizations would baulk at implementing your ideas today. Why?

Cable: I think the best answer is efficiency. Most organizations, most leaders, and most MBAs that we train, focus on how to do things more efficiently. I don’t think anything evil is going on. I don’t think leaders wake up and say: “How can I squash the souls of the workers?” They just don’t think of the long term and they don’t think about making the employment relationship feel like a relationship. When we are engaged in our work, we bring our whole mind to it so we make fewer defects and our focus is higher. We sell better because we’re more charged up about the products because we have pride in them. We don’t teach that stuff to leaders. We talk about cascading objectives and two-year goals.

Percy: What do you think of the current trend for happiness directors?

Cable: It portends this broader trend that I love – the Golden Age of Human Emotions. The word is getting out that firms need outputs of positive psychology. They need creativity, engagement and innovation in order to adapt. And if they don’t adapt, they’re going to die. Some leaders, and some organizations, see that writing on the wall. They may not have norms and policies that accept it, but they know that if they don’t change how their people feel, they won’t be able to change how the organization acts.

I have incredible hope about how big an impact you can have in small pockets. Someone who runs a process like onboarding can affect hundreds of people in terms of how they feel on their first day. That first day can affect how they relate to their co-workers and create an upwards spiral. I’m not saying that we have to change the culture from the top down. I’m saying that every team leader could do low-cost things to stimulate the part of the brain that makes work feel like it’s worth doing.

Percy: Which real-life business leaders and organizations impress you most?

Cable: I can give you the example of David Proctor, UK operations director of Molson Coors brewery in Burton upon Trent. He was in a class of mine a few years ago. He’s trying to move the organization towards servant leadership, with more coaching by leaders on the floor and employees feeling ownership for their jobs instead of seeing work as a thing they have to do.

Also, Adam Grant, an organizational psychology professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has been doing podcasts on tomato-processing company Morning Star. They don’t have any supervisors; they own their own process. It’s just this way of work that doesn’t start with “senior leaders telling us what to do”.

In 2016, Italian restaurant Osteria Francescana was named the best restaurant in the world. The chef, Massimo Bottura, says that to be a great leader you have to “find the sparkle” within every employee. He makes it his goal to give all of his employees the ability to express themselves. Self-expression is a major part of how he leads.

Percy: People say that the world is having a leadership crisis right now. Do you agree?

Cable: Yes. Leaders have been on a power trip and they have allowed themselves to become delusional that they are better people than the people who do the real work. And they’ve taken all the money and often cheated to get the money – they’ve cheated customers, they’ve cheated employees and they’ve cheated stockholders. They feel so entitled that they just take without seeing that they’re lucky. They’re lucky that they got an education instead of living in rural India. They’re lucky that they got to go to college. They should feel like they’re serving, but instead they’re generally just taking. Nobody is inspired by a taker.

I’m a straight white male so everything that I’ve got has been a gift. I’ve had affirmative action for 35 years. I work hard, but so do people who have to make dishcloths. Leadership has become synonymous with ego trips and power trips. We’ve let that happen.